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If you frequently work with virtual machines like I do, you have most likely used the Sysinternals tool NewSID to generate new machine SIDs for your cloned systems. If you’ve attempted to use NewSID on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system, you no doubt have discovered (as I did) that NewSID no longer works! As a workaround I reverted to using sysprep, anxiously awaiting an update to the utility that I have used for over ten years on an almost daily basis it seems. I was surprised when I read the news that NewSID would be retired, but this post from Mark Russinovich explains the reasoning behind retiring the tool, and also explains the myth of machine SID duplication. As it turns out, generating a new machine SID was never really necessary in the first place. Who knew!

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The Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool, developed by Microsoft Premiere Field Engineer (PFE) Clint Huffman, is a very powerful free tool available on CodePlex that makes the analysis of logged performance data much simpler. The utility is used to automate the assessment of a performance monitor counter log (in any format) and compares that information to known thresholds provided with the tool. It produces reports in HTML format and will generate alerts when thresholds are exceeded.

PAL includes threshold files for most major Microsoft products, including IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory. ISA and Forefront Threat Management Gateway support will be added in the near future.